Sysomos Blog

How People Currently Share Pictures On Twitter

Yesterday Twitter revealed that they will be rolling out their very own way to share photos on the microblogging network. Twitter will now give users a way to upload their pictures straight to Twitter without having to use a third-party service. An update like this really shows that Twitter is trying to find ways to prove their worth and keep people on their official page and apps as much as possible. This also falls into their new mandate of trying to give users across the board a “consistent user experience”.The service is slated to roll out in the next few weeks to use through Twitter.com. Shortly after that they will roll their photo service out to all of their official apps for phones, tablets and desktops. The company even says that they’re trying to work with mobile carriers so that non-smartphone users will be able to upload their photos via MMS.

What will this mean for the already established photosharing apps that work with Twitter such as TwitPic, Yfrog, Instagram and others? These apps are quite popular and some, like Instagram, have very devoted users. We’re not sure yet, but we do now know how popular these other apps are.

On May 30th we looked at all the tweets from that day and found that 14.9% of all tweets contained a link. Of all the tweets from that day 1.25% contained a link to a picture from a photo sharing service. That means 1/12th of all links shared are photos. On a busy day, Twitter gets about 170 million tweets, 1.25% means 2.125 million tweets daily link to pictures from third party services.

Among the tweets with images, the most popular service to share photos with was Twitpic (45.7%). The second most popular was Yfrog (29.3%), followed by Lockerz (formerly Plixi) (17.4%) and Instagram (5.2%).